Just to add to this discussion: if we are being really particular here, her best VDOT from her immediate post-collegiate years appears to be 64.8 from that 4:38 mile she ran in February 2007. Additionally, if she ran 16:09 in Sacramento in June of 2006, it was almost certainly at the NCAA outdoor championships that year. I don't remember watching the 5k but I was at that championship that year and it was stinking hot. Which furthers the point I was trying to make in my post that her track times don't necessarily speak to the level of athlete she was at the time due to different constraints (lack of competition in the Patriot League, no group of women at the time at AU to push her in training, a rigorous academic schedule, little to no travel to big "time trial" type meets we see more of nowadays, etc.).
I do believe bringing up anecdotal accounts of women who've achieved great things post-children or after a slump or a shift in career focus is relevant here, as YMMV pointed out purely because of the lack of data we have on women who decide to make a resurgence after a hiatus. So we don't actually have anything else to really go on. Societal and biological pressures for women in the 25-35 age group are very different for women than they are for men. I don't think it's a bad thing, just a reality of the culture we live in.
I'm not a science person, so perhaps this hypothesis is nonsense, but maybe there is a biological advantage to some of these women giving their bodies kind of a rest, or a different activity at least during those prime "child-bearing" years that sort of offsets the age factor a bit for whatever reason? Like it happened to be better for those individuals' bone densities or something? Or perhaps even just an incredibly positive psychological effect of less strings attached when they return to the sport. I don't know. I guess I'm just trying to say that given our lack of data, its at least worthwhile to think a bit outside of the box for possible deviations from the norm.