[MooMooMilkParty]

Good call on going pure python. To take this a bit further I made your changes and used numba with @jit(nopython=True, cache=True), for some interesting results. If I do include the sorting into the timing:

    Unsorted execution time: 0.2175428867340088 seconds
    Sorted execution time:   1.133354663848877 seconds

And if I don't:

    Unsorted execution time: 0.21171283721923828 seconds
    Sorted execution time:   0.08376479148864746 seconds