Here’s a frightening scenario that you, as a Kentucky basketball fan, don’t want to think about: Kentucky returning home from a road trip to Portland, Ore., and Hawaii 1-4.UK men’s basketball head coach John Calipari thinks it’s a realistic possibility.”Every one of those guys can beat us,” Calipari said. “I hope we’re not 1-4 when we get back, but we could be.”Calipari’s Cats have had little time to recover from the Enes Kanter news much less get their feet underneath them from last week’s season-opening win over East Tennessee State. But now is when we’ll really start to find out about this freshman-laden team.UK, already stationed in the Northwest, will face a dangerous Portland team that features last year’s top 3-point shooter in Jared Stohl on Friday at 7:30 p.m. PT before embarking to Hawaii for the EA Sports Maui Invitational. “Look, this is a hard trip,” Calipari said. “We are on our way to Hawaii to play three teams that are probably better than us. This is going to be a learning situation for us. We have to figure out what we do, how hard we have to play.”Particularly, Calipari is looking at how his team will get off the mat after it’s been knocked down. With a tournament field that includes the likes of No. 2 Michigan State, Connecticut and Kentucky’s tournament-opening opponent Oklahoma, chances are UK will face all the adversity it can handle.”There are a lot of experiences these guys have to go through,” Calipari said. “One of them is getting knocked down by a team you should beat because you weren’t ready to play and you think at halftime you can turn it on. That’s an experience they’re going to have to deal with. The other experience is going (against) a team that is just better than you. “How do you now play? You have to take better shots. You must play harder than they play or you can’t win the game. You can’t play loosey goosey. How do we now play? We’ve got all that stuff we’ve got to learn about. But that’s why you play these kinds of games.”It will still be very early in the season when Kentucky returns for a late Thanksgiving feast, but like last year’s ballroom affair in the Cancun trip, the Cats will have a better sense of how good the team is by they return home for December’s slate of games.”It tells us what we have to do, it tells us how far we have to go and where we’re at right now,” sophomore guard Jon Hood said. “That’s the main thing. Where are we and how do we move forward?”A couple of UKs returning veterans, Hood and senior forward Josh Harrellson, suggested that it was last year’s Cancun trip that really brought the team together. Though the Cats struggled to beat Stanford in the final game of the tournament, the out-of-state tournament provided the team with an invaluable bonding experience that would pay dividends later in the season.”Everything we did (in Cancun) we were together,” Harrellson said. “We’d go out to dinner every night. The whole team would go. If we went to the pool, the whole team would be there. It was a great experience and got us going.”UK will enter the Maui tournament as the youngest team on the island and one of the most inexperienced in college basketball. With only eight full years of Division I college experience on the roster, only eight teams in Division I can claim to have a younger team than UK.”We have many different issues than we did last year,” Calipari said. “One is we are not playing as many people. You have a lot of room for error when you play as many guys as we played last year. Last year, if someone was off their game, we could just sit them and we would be fine. We don’t have that luxury this year.”And if a player or two is off their game for this type of road trip, the losses could pile up quick. Depending on how one looks at it, the trip’s value could go beyond the wins and losses.”If you can look past a loss and get better then it doesn’t affect you,” Harrellson said. “If it gets to you, you can fall apart and separate.”