If you prefer the look of the less-than (<) or less-than-or-equal (<=), as indicators that match takes the value of the following function call, they are experimentally supported as aliases of the division operation (/).
You may define your own match objects, and can use them on memoized Re objects too. Putting a few of these optional things together:
answer = Match() # need to do this just once
if answer < Re(r'(?P<word>th..)').search('and that goes there'):
assert answer.word == 'that'