Why would they go through all this with Gordon, holding on to him when he was out of football after being suspended by the NFL for substance abuse violations, and then just hand him away to some other team now that he is back on the field?

Why? Why? Why?

That would be just stupid — idiotic, really — to do that, or to even think of doing that. It would defy logic.

This new regime has started to improved this team little by little by making common-sense decisions, something that was foreign to previous regimes. There is no way — absolutely, positively no way — that Executive Vice President Sashi Brown and head coach Hue Jackson are going to give up on this no-risk, high-reward experiment. They have nothing to lose. They inherited Gordon from the Tom Heckert regime.

We all know that Gordon is like the proverbial little girl with the curl in that when he’s good, as he was in 2013 when he led the NFL with 1,646 receiving yards and had the greatest season by a pass-catcher in Browns history, he is very, very, very good. And when he’s bad, as he was the last two seasons when he missed 27 of the 32 games while being suspended, he is very, very, very bad.

If Gordon is good — if he stay out of trouble and continue to shake off the rust from all that inactivity — then he could help the Cleveland passing attack, and thus the offense and the team overall, immeasurably. It would be like winning the lottery, only in this case, the Browns didn’t even have to buy a ticket. All they had to do was hold onto the ticket a previous owner of the home bequeathed them.

And if, as expected, unfortunately, he falls back into his old bad habits once again and implodes, then they can just wash their hands of Gordon — at least for a while — and move on.

But that hasn’t happened yet. And until it happens — if indeed it ever does — the Browns are going to ride the Josh Gordon train for as long as they can. After all the misfortune they’ve had in the expansion era, they are due a break or two or three or four or five, and perhaps this is one of them.

We’ll see.

As for the 31 other NFL teams, including the ones that inquired about the possibility of trading for Gordon, they’ll have to see this thing play out from afar. And that is as it should be.