I guess the question was kind of vague.. Really I was just looking for a way to avoid a variable assignment and improve my golf scores, and maybe understand why perl didn't like what I was doing.

print ( ( "hello awesome" =~ /(el).*(om)/ ) [1] ); is pretty much it. And yeah it was a trumped-up example that I didn't even bother to make realistic, to the point of not even looking it enough to notice that I totally spaced on the array name in the second statement.