You can stick a greedy quantifier before your non-greedy match. That way the greedy quantifier will eat up as much as it can while the non-greedy part will still match. You seem to call "lazy" what the Perl documentation calls "non-greedy" in perlre.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my $string = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog";
$string =~ /.*(the .*? dog)/i;
print "Match: '", $1, "'";

__END__
Match: 'the lazy dog'
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