When Robert Saleh stares at the screen, he finds himself tantalized.

“You just feel the team getting faster and faster and faster, and you’re going to see it on tape,” the Jets head coach said. “As you’re watching TV, you’ll be like, ‘Damn, these guys are flying around and they’re making plays and they’re talking smack.’ ”

The Jets’ defense, indeed, was flying around in Sunday’s season opener against the Ravens at MetLife Stadium. Their defensive players were fast, disruptive and they played with an attitude.

Eventually, though, as the comparatively lifeless offense failed to follow the lead of the defense as the Ravens separated themselves on the scoreboard, the defense eventually suffered a couple of breakdowns which led to the 24-9 result.

From the rubble of that loss, though, there was a silver lining to be extracted — the performance of the defense, which held Lamar Jackson and the Baltimore offense to 274 yards, including only 63 yards on the ground.

The defense underwent dramatic personnel upgrades in the offseason — upgrades that were on display against the Ravens and have the Jets ranked eighth in the league overall and third against the run after Week 1.

That silver lining now needs to become the strength that carries the Jets over the Browns Sunday in Cleveland, where they’ll try to avoid an 0-2 start for the fifth time in the past six seasons.

While 37-year-old backup quarterback Joe Flacco and the rest of the offense tries to avoid being terrorized by Browns lethal-edge rusher Myles Garrett, the defense may have to win this game.

The Browns produced 217 rushing yards and a 5.6-yard average in their 26-24 comeback win over the Panthers on Sunday. Nick Chubb churned out 141 of those yards on 22 carries and Kareem Hunt added 46 yards and a touchdown on 11 carries.

A repeat of those numbers Sunday will almost certainly mean a Browns win and yet another 0-2 start for the Jets, who are a young team with a lot of new players that’s starved for the positive reinforcement that comes with a victory.

Listening to some salty Saleh comments on Monday, publicly challenging anyone who mocks his team as the perennial loser the franchise has been for more than a decade, you get the feeling the coach is already on edge just one game into his second season as the team’s coach.

But Saleh is sure about what he sees — even in the loss to the Ravens. Most particularly on defense.

“It was a really good defensive performance with the exception of two plays which resulted in touchdowns,” he said.

Sure, that sounds like a loser’s lament, but Saleh has reason to be cheerful about his defense.

The secondary, with the addition of No. 1 draft pick Sauce Gardner and free-agent pickup D.J. Reed at cornerback as well as Jordan Whitehead and Lamarcus Joyner (who missed all but the 2021 season opener with a torn triceps) actually looks like a proper NFL defensive backfield.

The Jets, who are 3-17 in the month of September in the past six seasons, went through a four-game stretch last season when they yielded 54 points to the Patriots, 31 to the Bengals, and then 45 to the Colts and Bills. You don’t get the feeling that porous defensive performances like that will take place this season.

This defense is good enough to keep the Jets in games — as it did for three quarters of the loss to Baltimore. The defense may need to win the game against the Browns Sunday.

“I feel like we have the skill set and the scheme to be a dominant defense,” defensive lineman Quinnen Williams said.

“It just felt like we were the faster team,” Saleh said of the Ravens game. “A lot of these little mistakes … to busts, misalignments, whatever it might be … we have to learn how to do right longer. Something Kyle [Shanahan, the 49ers coach] has always said and I’ve taken with me from San Francisco — you’ve got to do right longer. And when you get these veteran teams like Baltimore, they just wear you out by doing right longer.”

Saleh knows he needs to get his players to “do right longer” ASAP or this season of hope could begin to slip away.

“I know that all the praise we’ve gotten in the offseason and the draft picks and the free agents, all of that is real,” Saleh said. “We have a really, really cool football team. Now, it’s on us as coaches to extract that out of them and get them to play better faster, which I think we will … I know we will. It’s going to happen. When? We’ll all know. You guys are going to feel it happen. I just know it.”