Lindsay Travis contributed to this feature.LOUISVILLE, Ky. – They won big, but they weren’t thrilled with how they did it.For the Kentucky Wildcats (35-0), each game is a battle against themselves. Up big? Doesn’t matter, what can we do to get better? How can everyone individually improve their game to then raise the overall level of the team? That’s the mindset this bunch has, and it’s clearly worked all season.”In this locker room it’s the same if you’re up 50 or you’re down 10,” sophomore forward Marcus Lee said. “Coach is always yelling at you to do better and that’s what makes us great. We’re always trying to push each other to do better no matter what the score is.”Top-seeded Kentucky led 16th seeded Hampton by 35 points Thursday night with 12:43 remaining in the game. From there, Hampton outscored Kentucky 28-16. Obviously, it was too little, too late, but it bookended a game that saw Kentucky hit just two of its first nine shots and five of its first 15.”We did some good things, we did some bad things,” junior forward Willie Cauley-Stein said.The good included a +20 advantage on the boards against a much smaller and overpowered opponent. Similarly, Kentucky outscored the Pirates 44-20 in the paint. The Cats dished out 15 assists while holding Hampton to just two, and had another solid performance at the foul line, converting 20 of 28 attempts.The bad included a sluggish start that was partly attributable to the Cats not tipping off until approximately 10:18 p.m., thanks to the game before theirs going to overtime, forcing UK to wait in the tunnel and locker room in anticipation of what had already been a very long day of waiting around.The bad things for Kentucky also included taking its foot off the gas in the second half, a lesson head coach John Calipari has preached to his team, and one that seems to have been heard.”You can’t do things on your terms in this tournament because what happens is you’ll have a 12-point lead, and then you’ll turn around, and it will be a 2-point game,” Coach Cal said. “What just happened? You broke down on two pick-and-rolls defensively, and then someone fouled, didn’t need to, and then all of a sudden, they make a play, and it’s a 2-point game.””Something you can take away is that no game is ever over, no matter what the score is,” Lee said. “That’s something you have to go with and you always have to battle throughout the whole game. You can’t just assume you’re going to win.”With all of that said, Kentucky did win its opening game of the Big Dance by 23 points and was able to unload its entire bench. Certainly it was a stark contrast to the other three games played in the KFC Yum! Center that day which were each decided by a single point, an NCAA Tournament record for one venue in a single day.Would Coach Cal, have liked to have maintained that 35-point lead throughout the remainder of the game or even strengthened it? Sure, but he knows that’s not always going to happen, especially when he’s leading the youngest team in the entire tournament field.”We held them to 30 percent (shooting from the field) and 25 (percent) from the 3,” Coach Cal said. “We fouled way too much today, but like I told the staff, you get up 35, it’s hard. It’s hard.”Back to the basics for BookerWhen Devin Booker came to Kentucky and first started playing with this team he just wanted to figure out how he’d fit in. Fast forward 35 games and the freshman knows what his role is: a shooter.Booker started the season in a shooting slump but after coming back from an injury he hit a streak that left many anxiously waiting for each reloaded 3. In a seven-game stretch from Dec. 13-Jan. 17, Booker hit 71.4 percent of his shots from deep. Add in the next four games, two where he didn’t hit a trey, and his shooting percentage was still 65.8 percent.Since the Cats played at Georgia on March 3, the Southeastern Conference Sixth Man of the Year hasn’t hit more than two 3s in a game. But all of that could of course change in the blink of an eye.During the SEC Coaches’ Teleconference prior to the NCAA Tournament, Coach Cal predicted that Booker would get back to his old ways of playing, his old ways of shooting.”Devin has to step up a little bit, but this has been a thing,” Calipari said. “I think you’ll see Devin in the tournament get back to the way he was playing, losing himself in the game. I think there are times he’s thinking a little too much because he played so well the expectation was that every shot was going to go in.”For the freshman, it’s not that he lacks confidence necessarily, it’s that he’s frustrated.”As long as we’re winning, I’m fine,” Booker said, “but if I’m frustrated it’s I’m frustrated with myself because I’m not playing the way that I work so hard to play. If there’s frustration it’s in myself, if anything.”Shooters just keep shooting and Booker knows that’s what he has to do, along with getting back to the basics of his game.”I just have to get back to fundamentals,” he said Thursday night. “I just have to have more confidence in my shot and keep doing what I was doing through the middle of the season. I feel like the next game I’ll knock down those shots.”His teammates know that he’ll knock down those shots too.”There are some guys like me, Aaron, Book, we weren’t hitting on the offensive side, so obviously you’re going to be down on yourself for that,” junior forward Willie Cauley-Stein said. “… (Aaron Harrison and Booker), those dudes hit shots all the time. Today they’re not hitting. Hopefully Saturday they’re hitting.”‘They swear I’m Superman or something’At times this season, Cauley-Stein’s athleticism has seemed to be out of this world.It’s not just that the 7-footer can guard all five positions on the floor, including limiting second team All-SEC point guard K.T. Harrell to 1-of-12 shooting, it’s the dunks he’s thrown down too.Oh, those dunks.Against Florida, Cauley-Stein got the feed from Andrew Harrison and took off for one of the best dunks of the entire college basketball season. One game later, Cauley-Stein could have opened up his own personal poster business with the number of jams he threw down at the expense of LSU defenders.”I still like the whole criticism is, ‘I’m soft,’ or something like that, so I’m just going to start dunking on people,” Cauley-Stein said after Kentucky’s 34-point rout of South Carolina on Valentine’s Day. “I don’t see how you can call me soft if I’m just dunking on people, so that’s my whole mentality going into games now.”On Thursday night against 16th seeded Hampton, that mentality was missing, and the result were a few missed bunnies that had Big Blue Nation scratching its collective head.”They swear I’m Superman or something and I can just fly over everybody,” the Olathe, Kan., native said. “I mean, a lot of it I probably could, but you’re not thinking of it like that. You’re not thinking you can just jump over somebody and dunk it until you actually do it and you’re just like, ‘OK, well maybe I could do that.’ “That’s not to say Cauley-Stein is down on himself. Though he finished 1 for 5 from the floor, he did score seven points, grab a team-high tying 11 rebounds, dish out two assists and block two shots. The missed shots, they’ll happen, for Cauley-Stein it’s about wiping the slate clean and moving on to the next one.The example he used after the game went back to just one week prior at the SEC Tournament in Nashville. In the Wildcats’ opening game against Florida, Cauley-Stein went 2 for 9 with nine points and four rebounds. He then followed that disappointing performance with 18 points and seven boards against Auburn in the semifinals, 15 points and 10 rebounds against Arkansas in the championship, and SEC Tournament MVP honors when all was said and done.”You miss four one-footers that you should probably dunk, OK, but I didn’t, so you miss some,” Cauley-Stein said. “To me, I’m not looking at it, I’m not killing myself on it because I know I’m going to make them. I just happened to miss them tonight.”Getting physicalThere’s no question that UK has a size advantage at some position in every game they play. When you’ve got the tallest basketball team in the country that’s not all too surprising.So how do other teams keep their heads above water when facing off with a team fans have compared to the MonStars from Space Jam?”Teams are going to do whatever they need to do to try to stay with us and try to compete with us,” sophomore forward Dakari Johnson said. “And I do think they’re going to try to be physical with us, maybe try to get us out of our heads. But we do a good job controlling that and just being physical back.”The Cats aren’t unaccustomed to teams trying to push them around a bit. Case in point: Auburn’s 7-foot-2 Trayvon Reed getting chippy with 5-9 Tyler Ulis in the semifinals of the SEC Tournament. Between league play and practice, they’re pretty familiar with it.”We’re from the SEC so we’re kind of use to that with huge bodies,” Lee said. “I guess you can see they were really trying to do something like that, but we’re kind of used to it.””In practice we’re going at each other too and we’re being physical with each other too, so we’re prepared for those (things) during the games,” Johnson said.Following the SEC Tournament semifinals, Auburn head coach Bruce Pearl talked about the type of team it would take to beat the, so far, undefeated Cats.”I think it would need to be a team that would be a big physical club that could be able to withstand their size and their dominance,” Pearl said. “It would have to be a great team.”Teams like Georgia, Ole Miss and Texas A&M had enough size to hang with UK, according to Pearl. Those teams each gave the Cats some of their closest contests of the season, with the Rebels and Aggies taking the No. 1 team in the country into overtime and double overtime, respectively.The Cats know they’ll get their opponents’ best games and if the opponent starts a slugfest, Booker thinks it’ll help push UK to play their best ball.”A lot of teams have tried that, but we know how to respond to that,” he said. “I think that brings the best (out) of us when teams try to be the aggressor first.”