MIAMI — As Andy Elisburg speaks from Chicago, the moment is not lost on the Miami Heat general manager.

“It’s a nice anniversary of being able to start to get back to normalcy,” he says.

The fact that he is speaking from Chicago, at the NBA’s pre-draft combine, says it all.

For Elisburg, the league’s annual scouting event marks the first time he has traveled from South Florida since a major health scare a year ago left him immobile and near death, a fight back from an infection that came at the cost of two amputated toes and working this past season at Kaseya Center in a motorized wheelchair.

“A year ago,” he says, “it was kind of in the back of my mind that I wanted to be able to get back into some form of walking and traveling in a year. And May 6th was a year.”

For Elisburg, events such as the combine had been his normal for decades, as had Heat road games.

This season, the singular focus away from the arena was on rehab, now back on his feet enough for short walks and somewhat remarkable strides in his recovery, considering where he stood a year ago.

Where the combine typically would have been a week of meetings, evaluations, interviews, fraternizing, this trip will be shorter for Elisburg.

For good reason.

“I don’t want to miss that much therapy,” he said.

A year ago, Elisburg was transported to Kaseya Center on draft night in an ambulance, taken through the building in a gurney, an eight-person medical team at his side as he worked the night in the team’s war room.

In the intervening months, he became his typical courtside presence at practices and games.

But at the combine, he is back in his element, including a meeting of fellow general managers.

“It meant as much for them as it did for me, that, you know, they can see you and touch you and just like, ‘You’re OK,’” he said, “as opposed to just sort of hearing it or looking at a picture and you’re not quite sure until you see.

“And so there’s that, there’s that notion of being able to kind of be out and then just be able to participate in a meeting, and it’s like, it’s like any other meeting.”

So normalcy, but, quite literally, miles still to go.

“I’m able to walk. I’m able to walk with a cane for smaller walks and having to build back my endurance for longer walking,” he said, eschewing his motorized wheelchair for something more portable for this trip. “But there’s a lot more, I’ve been working on the form of walking, not just getting from Point A to Point B as fast as I can. It’s how are you walking, walking properly, and all the education that goes into that.”

Then he pauses for a phrase that makes abundantly apparent all the time still spent around Pat Riley and Erik Spoelstra. “It’s still that sort of 1% better every day.”

“There’s a lot that has happened that allowed me to get to this point in time,” he said of this Chicago trip. “Because otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to come if I didn’t have as much improvement as I had.”

So, yes, he again will be at the team’s draft headquarters next month, this time without a curfew to return to a hospital room, for months back in a Miami condo.

“It’ll still be all the draft preparation, we’ll see what free agency brings and what we’re doing from that perspective. I want to go to summer league,” he said

But it likely will be another year away from summer league, as the recovery process remains ongoing.

“I’m kind of looking to July to get a knee replacement, which I needed before any of this happened,” he said. “This  just accentuated what was already needed.”

Through it all, the commitment to work remained ongoing. But there also was a lesson about commitment to self, as well.

“My next thing of where I want to travel to is to get back to New York for some theater,” he said. “It’s about doing the normalcy. I came here to Chicago. Next? Go to the theater.”