You want to keep track of the indices, not the actual element. If, for example, your "best" routine were simply the max-function:

sub best {
  my $d = shift;
  my ($best_idx) = sort { $d->[$b] <=> $d->[$a] } 0 .. $#$d;
  return $best_idx;
}
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Then you would do:

my $idx = best(\@numbers);
my $other = $data[$idx];
[download]

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