How can I use the range operator with regexes when the text to match is not in $_?

I am trying to use the range operator while parsing a portion of a file. Basically, my code consists of:

use strict;
use warnings;

while (<DATA>){
    if (/start/ .. /stop/){
        print; #print only lines between the two markers
    }
}
__DATA__
ignored 1
ignored 2
start
taken 1
taken 2
stop
ignored 3

My problem is that this code uses the implicit $_ variable.

My actual code uses a variable to store the current line because I am making some changes to $line before testing it with the range operator. I have not found a way to use the .. operator with an explicit variable. I have found a workaround by assigning $_ right before the test but that looks like an ugly hack to me:

use strict;
use warnings;

while (defined (my $line = <DATA>)){
    $_ = $line;
    if (/start/ .. /stop/){
        print $line;
    }
}
__DATA__
ignored 1
ignored 2
start
taken 1
taken 2
stop
ignored 3

Is there a cleaner way to do this?

You could do:

while (my $line = <DATA>) {
    if ($line =~ /start/ .. $line =~ /stop/) {
        print $line;
    }
}