Thank you @jshaffstall ! I will work to impliment it into my code: it makes sense and should work!
This is the “hint” (well, answer) I needed! I did look for something like a tables.order_by() method, which is tailor made to do what I want… but I had trouble finding that in the docs and a duck duck go search. That method will go into the notebook as a VERY useful thing 
Many thanks again.
A question: can the sort() or sorted() methods also be used?