I had an idea for a possible importlib.util API to support this capability: an "ignore_entries=0" default arg to https://docs.python.org/dev/library/importlib.html#importlib.util.find_spec

The new arg would say how many found entries to skip when looking for the module, defaulting to returning the first hit as it does now.

The challenging part would be that all the implicit import system caching is currently built around the notion of "there can be only one", so we'd likely want to introduce something like a new name shadowing cache that mapped "(modname, ignored_entries)" pairs to module specs (and was cleared by importlib.invalidate_caches() along with everything else).