In short, no. You cannot have an asynchronous function return a meaningful value synchronously, because that value does not exist at that time (as it is built asynchronously in the background).
You can, however, return a Promise object, representing the "potential return value" of the asynchronous operation, and bind a function to that object using done() or similar. That way, your function gets return semantics (instead of having to chain the control flow into a callback), and remains asynchronous.
