For the first time in 13 years, the Bengals enter the final game of the regular season next week with a chance to qualify for the Wild Card playoff game thanks to Saturday night’s stunning 30-24 overtime victory over the Broncos at Paycor Stadium.

But unlike 2011 when they secured the wild card, they have to win. In Pittsburgh. And they still need the Chiefs to beat the Broncos, and both the Colts and Dolphins need to split their final two games.

But whatever. The Bengals are the team no one wants to play against after their fourth straight win on Saturday. Four weeks ago, when they were 4-8 after losing to the Steelers, no one gave them a chance.

The chance is now 12%. But it’s not like five or nine used to be.

“We know we’ve had a good football team all along. It’s disappointing that we came up short in these games. It hasn’t changed our process,” Bengals head coach Zac Taylor said. “It didn’t change what our guys believed in. We didn’t have to change everything we did. We still believed in what we were doing and now we’ve won four in a row and now we have to make it five in a row.

Slot cornerback Mike Hilton, the veteran Steeler who continued his hot month with seven tackles Saturday, heads to Pittsburgh to lead his Bengals with 44^Th AFC North game.

“It will be a matter of life or death again. We have to go out and win a game against a good opponent,” Hilton said. “Of course, some things are bound to happen that are beyond our control. But tonight was something very special. To have a chance. That’s all you could ask for at this time of year.”

If Saturday night was indeed wide receiver Tee Higgins’ final Paycor game as a Bengal, he gave the 66,546 spectators and himself a postcard memory.

It’s the first time he’s scored three touchdowns during his five NFL seasons here, and his 11 catches for 131 yards are surpassed only by his 12-catch, 194-yard game three years ago when Joe Burrow passed for 525 yards. Pass day played against the Ravens, also here.

On Saturday night, he caught the final two balls of Burrow’s 412-yard overtime masterpiece, running a 31-yard moonball to the ground before it went out of bounds down the left sideline and then scoring the walk-off touchdown. Pass for three yards with 67 seconds remaining in OT on an arrow to the front left pylon.

(For those keeping score at home, this is the Bengals’ first overtime touchdown since cornerback Corey Sawyer’s pick-six against old friend Scott Mitchell in Detroit in 1998.)

Higgins let head coach Zac Taylor know on Tuesday how much he wanted to play Saturday, 48 hours after injuring his ankle against the Browns. In the offensive meeting, Higgins didn’t see his name in the personnel groups on the board and sent a text message to Taylor from the back of the room.

“You never know when a player won’t finish the (previous) game. It’s early in the week. Trust me when I say this, we do this all the time so it’s nothing big,” Tayor said. “But that was his way of telling me early on, ‘You’ll have me.'”

An easy decision for Higgins, who is playing on the franchise tag and staring at free agency. That’s why he sent this text message to Taylor:

“It could be my last game that I play here in this stadium with stripes. I wanted to go out with a bang… Hopefully that’s not the case, but you never know what the future holds. There’s no better way to go out.”

Higgins made life difficult for Broncos defensive coordinator Vance Joseph and his No. 4 defense. For the most part, Joseph opted to cover NFL scoring leader Ja’Marr Chase with No. 1 cornerback Patrick Surtain II and some help while his other cornerback, Riley Moss, was able to pursue Higgins.

To honor Randy Moss, Higgins “mossed” Moss on the final two throws and the 12-yard touchdown pass that gave the Bengals a 17-10 lead when the 6-4 Higgins hit a jump ball off the helmet of the 6-1 Moss scraped in the back of the end zone.

Higgins also hit Moss in overtime with a 19-yard slant shot that set up Cade York’s 33-yard field goal miss.

But it was the 31-yarder that opened the game 69 minutes into the game.

“I ran five go routes before that,” Higgins said with a smile. “I was a bit exhausted. But he was able to give me the chance to get the last one.”

Burrow looked like he had made the difference rather than Higgins turning him into one.

“We hit them short with 10-yard stops and even made some of them, so I was waiting for the right moment to get our shot there,” Burrow said. “What a great catch of tea. Tea made a big splash. He was incredible today.”

The same reasoning applied to the winner of the Denver 3, where Burrow inserted the ball to Higgins, who made an out to Moss at the left pylon.

“They played it like that down there all day,” Burrow said. “We had already hit Tee in the back of the end zone and thought they would be worried about that. So it was a great decision by Zac to throw a shot right there at the front pylon, and then Tee made a great catch.”

Chase had nine catches for 102 yards. He called it a “quiet” game, but it was enough to break TJ Houshmandzadeh’s Bengals record of 112 receptions in a season with 117, an NFL lead of 16 catches before Sunday’s game. He also passed 1,600 yards (1,612) and extended his lead over Justin Jefferson to 225 yards. He didn’t score a touchdown, but is still four yards ahead of Terry McLaurin.

“Tell him ‘Thank you,'” Chase said when asked about his reaction to eclipsing Houshmandzadeh. “I accept that. I would have liked a touchdown, but I’ll take it.”

Chase had an easy touchdown on the second drive when Burrow completed a flip at the Denver 2, separated from the unfortunate Moss and shot high into the air at the right pylon. But it was a shallow fall that didn’t follow him the rest of the way. It was Higgins who told Chase on the sidelines to forget it.

“I can’t be frustrated when I do something like that,” Chase said. “It happens. I have to stay in the game.”

Higgins had a similar problem much later. With 5:08 left in regulation, Higgins fumbled a ball that Surtain had knocked out at the Denver 40 before Higgins could pin it to his chest.

That could have been fatal at 17-17. But that’s the kind of game it was. The Bengals responded six plays later at their own 49 when linebacker Germaine Pratt intercepted rookie quarterback Bo Nix at the Bengals’ 39.

“It could have lost the game,” Higgins said. “Greetings to (rookie wide receiver) Jermaine Burton. “By the way, he said, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll come back and win the game for us.’ And indeed.’”

Yes, running back Chase Brown sprained his ankle when he suddenly stopped on the Denver 1 with 1:31 left in regulation and had to leave the game. The idea wasn’t to score, run out the clock, kick a field goal and Denver would only be down by about 20 seconds, 20-17.

But when Brown was injured, Taylor opted to allow Burrow a touchdown with 1:29 left. Nix immediately marched 70 yards through Denver and threw a fourth-and-25 yard touchdown pass to wide receiver Marvin Mims Jr. to tie the score with eight seconds left.

“The (Brown) injury changed everything,” Taylor said. “We would have been able to kick the walk-off field goal, I think, with about 10 seconds left, and it’s nobody’s fault. We told Chase to slide at the one (yard line) because we thought that’s what they were going to do. “Let’s score what he did there.”

“He did a great job. “Unfortunately he hurt his ankle so we were given a timeout, which changed everything,” Taylor said. “Now you’re at the one on second-and-goal and you can get it down and make sure they use their timeout and then try to score a touchdown from there on third down and maybe kick it on fourth down. But you saw ours.” The low red zone against them is tough all day.

The Broncos showed why they came into the game with the NFL’s second-best red zone defense. They made it terrible for the Bengals’ third-best team.

Cincy spent the night inside the 20 on seven drives, but scored just three touchdowns and went scoreless for just the fourth and fifth times this season.

“Nothing has been easy for us, especially with the runs down there because they are just so overwhelmed with their staff down there,” Taylor said. “We just did a quarterback sneak and told Joe to score. If you score, that’s great. If not, we’ll try something else and they’ll have to use their time off.”

Brown said he didn’t get the impression that Denver would let him score; “They would have let me run through the gaps and go in, but (they pursued).”

Brown didn’t feel like he could return to the game at 100% on Saturday night (Khalil Herbert had four big runs for 23 yards in his absence), but he didn’t seem too worried about playing in Pittsburgh.

“I had the same thing in college,” Brown said. “I suffered a sprain at Purdue when I was going to play Michigan next week, and I played pretty well.”…

The most disheartening moment of the season, York’s game-winning 33-yard field goal that hit the left upright with just 2:43 left, was followed by the biggest success of the year. A 23-second three-and-out by a Bengals defense that struggled at the end of games but prevented a first down here that would have resulted in a tie and eliminated the Bengals from the playoffs.

“Here we go again,” Hilton said of his thoughts on the sidelines after the missed field goal. “It was just one of those moments where we didn’t panic on the sideline. We just needed one more stop. Biggest threesome of the season. We were in man. They got out of the run toward the end of the game and let Nix fall behind. …

There were actually two big three-and-out shots that contained York’s miss. In the first round, Hilton made a safe tackle against the elusive Mims. On the second three-and-out, rookie cornerback Josh Newton dropped Mims and lost a yard on a swing pass. That was on second down. On third down, sophomore cornerback DJ Ivey was covering tight end Adam Trautman when Nix ran into the pocket and threw an incompletion…

Bengals right tackle Amarius Mims, who reportedly broke his hand against Cleveland last week, tried to leave Saturday but didn’t make it past the first half and was replaced by Devin Cochran…