I have blocks placed into regions in Drupal 7 usi!ng the Context module. For the most part it’s fine that all those blocks get rendered and printed at the page.tpl.php level, but, sometimes, I want to render them inside node.tpl.php, because I want to place things more specifically within the flow of node-level content. But, the block_get_blocks_by_region function doesn’t give me the blocks I need, because context is kind of off working in its own lane.
Once I figured that out, I figured there must be a way to manually get what I needed via the context module. This bit right here is the bit I needed to do that.