In 2012, he departed for federal prison from precisely this spot, his family home on the North Side of Chicago, surrounded by a frenzy of television cameras. The spectacle returned on Wednesday, as a helicopter buzzed overhead. News reporters bundled in parkas to chronicle his return, drawing stares from neighbors and dog-walkers in what is usually a quiet neighborhood. Someone waved a cutout photo of Mr. Blagojevich’s smiling face, attached to a broomstick, high in the air.

True to form, Mr. Blagojevich emerged from his house later than promised (“We’re back on Blago time,” one reporter said), his dark brown hair turned silvery in prison. He spoke expansively for close to 20 minutes without notes, and with his wife, Patti, at his side.

He quoted the Bible and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He recited poetry. He denounced racism. He dropped a few Spanish words. He described himself as a “freed political prisoner” and said he hoped “to turn an injustice into a justice.”

And he spoke of his eight years in prison, the solitary nights behind “the iron door that can shut you in, a small window with bars on it, and a bunk bed.”

“I slept on the top bunk,” Mr. Blagojevich recalled. “Often late at night I would look through that window and past those bars out into the night sky and I’d think of home, I’d think of my children, I’d think of Patti. Sometimes I could almost feel her near me,” he said.