For newcomers to college basketball , getting acclimated to new surroundings is a process that doesn’t happen overnight. Freshmen have to adjust to their new teammates, to living on their own for the first time and to a new level of class work.Quickly integrating a new crop of talented first-year players has become a hallmark of Kentucky basketball under John Calipari. His first two teams each heavily relied on the contributions of freshmen have advanced to the Elite Eight and Final Four in back-to-back years.Calipari’s latest top-ranked class has a leg up on even those precocious predecessors. Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, Marquis Teague, Anthony Davis and Kyle Wiltjer have all known for at least a year they would be suiting up for the Wildcats in 2011-12″It seems like we’ve been here forever,” Davis said.Teague announced he would attend Kentucky in April of 2010 and he says he’s felt like a Wildcat ever since and everyone from fans to coaches to players have treated him like he was part of the team.”Everybody treats us like we’ve been on Kentucky since we were 10,” Teague said. “They take care of us out here and make sure we’re all right. All the other players make sure we’re good and if we need anything they help us out.”Teague committed early, but he wasn’t even the first of the bunch to make his decision. Kidd-Gilchrist announced his commitment to Kentucky approximately a week before Teague and immediately put on his recruiting hat. Kidd-Gilchrist knew where he was going to be playing and he wanted his team to be as strong as possible.”I wanted to have the best team coming in and that’s what I have right now,” Kidd-Gilchrist said.Kidd-Gilchrist may have a future as a college coach once his playing career ends, because it was only days before Teague followed. A few months later, Davis and Wiltjer joined and the class was set. As a result, the four had the unique experience of watching the 2010-11 Cats, a team they already felt a part of, make a run to the Final Four.”I remember being really excited watching the games with my family,” Wiltjer said. “I felt like I was part of it already knowing all the guys. It was really exciting to watch them make that run and hopefully we can make a bigger one this year.”Each of the quartet reported intently watching all of UK’s games throughout the tournament run and wanting to improve on it, but Davis took things a step further. When speaking of last year’s team, he used the word “we” and recalled clearly the reason for UK’s 56-55 defeat in the Final Four against Connecticut.”They lost because they missed a lot of free throws,” Davis said, referring to UK’s 4-for-12 performance from the stripe. “Free throws are a big key. A lot of people practice free throws, even when we’re tired because we don’t want to be the team that lost because of free throws.”Senior Darius Miller was a part of that Final Four team and this freshman class is the third of Calipari’s he has watched arrive on campus. He sees a similar talent level out of this group, but believes some of the growing pains of those previous classes could be avoided due to the relationships that have already been cultivated over the past year.”With the visits they took, we’ve seen them a lot,” Miller said. “They’ve all been introduced to us before they got here. They’ve been a part of our family for a while now.”Family is a word that has become closely identified with the Kentucky basketball program under Calipari. Establishing the kinds of relationships that merit the term takes time and work, but much of that time and work has already been logged.”They’ve been around lot more, so we already had built relationships with them before they got here,” Miller said. “Now it’s just extending the relationships and making sure they carry over onto the court.”The process of carrying those relationships onto the court begins in earnest on Friday at Big Blue Madness. The team has been able to play pick-up games all summer and practice a handful of times, but Madness really signals the start of the season. For the four freshmen, the event will be a full circle kind of moment. It was Big Blue Madness 2010 when Kidd-Gilchrist, Teague, Davis and Wiltjer first came together as a group. By that time, all four had announced plans attend UK the following season and a collective campus visit was organized. It was that night the countdown to Big Blue Madness 2011 began.”It was something we’ve been looking forward to,” Wiltjer said. “To finally be here, we’re really excited about (Friday) night.”