After hours of careful searching in the sticky heat, the group had finally found their quarry: a massive Burmese python, commonly hunted in the Florida Everglades to mitigate its impact as an invasive species. They whooped in excitement and leaped from the truck.

The snake looked pretty big, Waleri recalled as he approached. Maybe around 10 feet.

Then it slithered the rest of the way out of the grass, uncoiling and extending to its full length.

Waleri wrestled the python into submission — jumping out of the way as the snake lunged toward him, fangs bared, before darting back in to close his hands around its neck — in a dramatic encounter that the group captured on video early Monday.

It was already a remarkable score for Waleri, a 22-year-old rising college senior at Ohio State University, and his group: a mix of college and childhood friends on an amateur hunting trip who could hardly boast the experience or credentials of the contractors paid by the state to root out the snakes.

Then experts measured their catch. The Conservancy of Southwest Florida measured the python to be 19 feet, calling it the longest Burmese python ever captured in Florida in a news release Wednesday.

Waleri grew up in Naples, Fla., and was always outdoorsy, he said. As a kid, he went backwater fishing and hunted deer and hogs. After hearing rumors that hunters in Florida could go after snakes, he became enthralled by a Discovery Channel program about snake hunter Dusty Crum. When he got older, he had to try it himself.

It helped that Waleri was also protecting the picturesque swamps and wetlands around his home. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission permits the hunting and killing of Burmese pythons, which can prey on animals as large as alligators.

“They’re incredibly impactful by consuming a ton of native wildlife,” Ian Easterling, a biologist with the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, said in an interview produced by the conservancy. “It completely messes up the food web.”

Waleri, who has been hunting pythons for two years, started slow. As he got his bearings, he’d searched fruitlessly for hundreds of hours along Florida roads, he said. He worked up to bigger and bigger catches, enduring countless sharp — but nonvenomous — bites from pythons along the way.

By the time he set off for the Big Cypress National Preserve on Sunday evening, he felt practiced enough to bring along three friends with little experience catching pythons.

“I kind of wanted to show them the Florida experience,” Waleri said.

For around five hours, they searched and spotted several snakes native to the area — but no pythons. Then Waleri saw the large, olive-green snake looming ahead of them in the road.

Seeing the python extend to its full length gave the group pause. But Waleri didn’t want to pass up the chance to capture such a large snake. One of Waleri’s friends grabbed its tail to keep it from slithering back into the grass. But it was up to Waleri to subdue it by getting control of its head. He wasn’t wearing gloves.

“I was genuinely scared to grab it,” Waleri said. “Getting bit by something like that would probably send me to the hospital.”

The python lunged at Waleri and his friends around five times, he said. After the last attempt, Waleri saw his opening. His friends whooped and cheered — “Let’s goooo! Dude!” — like they were watching a wrestling match. Then they rushed to help. As Waleri grappled with the snake’s head, it coiled around him, and Dorobanti and the rest of the group had to help pull it off.

“It’s trying with all of its might to kill Jake,” Dorobanti said.

Another python hunter came to assist them and wrapped the python’s mouth shut with electrical tape, subduing it for good. Waleri sank to his knees in relief. The python was humanely killed that night, Waleri said. It was too big to fit in the box they’d brought, so the group emptied out a drinks cooler to transport it home.

Waleri brought the snake to the Conservancy of Southwest Florida on Wednesday, where experts took down the python’s jaw-dropping measurements.

Easterling, the biologist, told The Post that while it’s hard to account for all pythons across the world, Waleri’s catch tops other famously long pythons captured in the United States, including an 18-foot, 9-inch specimen in the Everglades in 2020 and a snake that was kept in a safari in Illinois that measured 18 feet, 10 inches, which Guinness World Records has listed as the world’s longest Burmese python.

When it comes to hunting pythons in Florida, bigger can be better, he added.

“Obviously animals of that scale are causing a lot of damage to the wildlife,” Easterling said. “To get to that size, think of how many animals it had to consume.”

Waleri gave the snake’s body to the conservancy for research but plans to take the skin to a tannery to have it preserved, he said. It’ll be mounted — at its full length — along a wall in his living room.

“From where we’ve come from, the hundreds of hours we put in hunting before we ever even caught our first snake,” Waleri said, “ … it’s a dream come true.”