scoping problem?

[rocroc]

Here is a text file containing data I need to munge:

"ADELMAN","John","adad","Ray"
"AGAN","John","agag","Aditya"
"AHMED","John","ahah","Conor"

Here is a perl script to do some munging:

my $username;
my $color;

while(<>){
    chomp;
    s/"//g;
    ($username,$color) = (split /,/,$_)[2,3];
    if ("agag" =~ m/($username)/){print STDOUT "here is the username: 
+$username\n"}
}

Here is the output when I invoke perl test.pl test.txt at the command line:

here is the username:

so note what's happening here: Evidently, the interpolation of the variable $username works just fine in the match "agag" =~ m/($username)/. But then, $username get's treated as empty (uninitialized?) inside the call to print. I'm totally stumped. please help.