There has been several other events like that (Django, Pandas and data science..). I don't think Python's popularity can be ascribed to any single event, it just happens to be a language that is reasonably close to pseudocode with an excellently thought-out (I mean best in the industry) standard library. Python is practical, first and foremost. That's why it won, unlike other languages it doesn't really have an ideological agenda.
Zope predates all of those, and slowly as you say people got interested and started using it for other stuff, like being a better Perl.
Python has an agenda as well, Guido has said multiple times it was a language designed for teaching programming, and one of the reasons Zen of Python came early on.
Not really, Python got popular in 2000s because it was the only sane of the three choices - Perl, Python, TCL. You must be young.