CLEVELAND - Words float like canaries from Chad Johnson's mouth. What he thinks, he mostly says. When Cleveland went ahead 7-0 before the first beer foam settled, Johnson said to the Bengals defense, "I got you." When the Browns made it 14-7, he did it again. "Y'all rest a little while. I gotcha on this (drive), too."

You can take Chad Johnson one of a few ways: You can roll your eyes and tell him to shut up. Or you can take him at his word and hold on for the ride.

Johnson wasn't concerned with a minute left in the half, Bengals at their 20, down seven and Marvin Lewis ordering a running play. Lewis' defensive-coach nature sometimes makes him the Ronald Reagan of play-calling. That didn't bother Chad.

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Photos of Sunday's game

"I'm going to be open, regardless," Johnson said after the game. "I'm not coverable."

Such unapologetic swagger would look foolish on a lesser player. On Johnson, it's prophetic. The Bengals followed Brandon Bennett's timid first-down plunge with a couple completions. Then Jon Kitna had about a half-hour to throw, stepped up and hit Johnson on a deep post. Fifty-five yards, touchdown, tie game at halftime.

Johnson was open. Regardless. He might not be open all the time. But nobody has covered him yet. This small bit of sweet audacity was so un-Bengals-like, it ought to be replayed in the home locker room every day for a year. It was enough to peel another layer of skepticism from the sad walls of Bengaldom.

They won Sunday, 21-14. You could say it was a sloppy win against a bad team, and you'd be right.

Once, Bengals defensive tackle Tony Williams was called for "movement unnatural to the game." Some of us thought Our Men could have been flagged for that every week for the previous 12 years.

But really, so what? We haven't counted style points here since Ickey last Shuffled. When your team is Olive Oyl, and it wins the Junior Miss, you aren't checking for an overbite. A win is a win.

"Chopping wood," Willie Anderson calls it. That's Lewis' line. "We're gonna keep chopping wood. The first couple cuts, that tree's not gonna fall. But if we keep at it, it will."

Felling trees around here requires more than Marvin's Abe Lincoln psychology. At 0-3, you could wonder: When do they tire of his voice? At what winless point does chopping wood go from sound advice to giving you back pain, whereupon you just say, as many Bengals teams have, the hell with it? As Jon Kitna said, "At 0-3, people could really start to doubt."

This win was big, if only for that. The skeptics don't need much prodding around here, and that goes for those inside the Bengals locker room as well. For a week at least, Lewis still gets to be Patton, and chopping wood still sounds like the way to go.

Give Johnson some credit. His personality lights up the room. His talent lights up the scoreboard. He gives the woebegone Bengals a little trash-talky confidence - a little presence, the likes of which they haven't had since Boomer Esiason.

"Just run, I'm throwing it," was Jon Kitna's order to Johnson on the decisive 55-yarder. It's an interesting pairing, the pious, devout Kitna and the let-it-roll Johnson. For the moment, it's working.

"It's trust," Kitna said. "I didn't see Chad. I just put it where I thought he would be."

Johnson was there, past two Browns defensive backs. Not coverable.

"I just ran straight past 'em," he said.

He does that a lot now. When a man plays a good game, he ought to be allowed to talk one, too.

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E-mail: pdaugherty@enquirer.com

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