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greedy capture with sed

I am trying to greedily capture text with `sed`.
For example, I have the string `abbbc`, and I want to capture all of the repeated `b` characters, so that my result is `bbb`.
Here's an attempt at a solution:
```console
$ sed -n 's/.*\(b\+\).*/\1/p' <<< abbbc
b
```
As shown in the output of the command, the capture only obtains a single `b` rather than my desired result `bbb`.

I know I could prepend and append the "not b" pattern (`[^b]`) to my capture, which would give me the desired result:
```console
$ sed -n 's/.*[^b]\(b\+\)[^b].*/\1/p' <<< abbbc
bbb
```
However, this solution is a bit inelegant, and may become much more complicated when the match is not as simple. So I'm hoping there's another way to force the capture to be greedy.