How to retain playlist song order when importing to iTunes Match?

I have a number of iPod classics with media and playlists I curated over the years. I want to transfer these files and particularly the playlists to iTunes Match. Unfortunately when doing this following Apple's tutorials, the song order in my Playlists change. iTunes Match seems to automatically re-sort the playlist by artist name. Is there a way to defeat the automatic reordering of the playlist songs? I have tried to rename the song titles numbering each song, but iTunes seems to ignore the numbering scheme. I would just like to duplicate the Playlist song sequences just as they are on my iPod classics. Countless hours were spent creating those playlists. Surely there must be a work-around that doesn't render all this work wasted time?