That's what the top-level commenter was doing.

Ok. It wasn't clear what "importing it locally" meant. I've worked with some people who would use that phrase to mean "copy paste it into the local file".

Fair point :P. I think I might have seen someone mean it like that as well in the past.

And a common stdlib trick is to bind these via function arguments e.g.

    def foo(a, b, thing=util.thing):
        ...