All the talk last year was 40-0.Could Kentucky win them all? Could the 2013-14 group become the first team since Indiana in 1976 to go undefeated? What would be the biggest challenge in UK’s pursuit of perfection?Silly Cats — they never stood a chance.Kentucky, as we all know now, would fold in the first half of last season under such overwhelming expectations. Supremely talented but characteristically naïve for young guys, the freshman-dominated team lost early and unexpectedly often during spots of last season.Technically speaking, the Cats never fully embraced the idea of going 40-0, but they sure as heck didn’t downplay the talk either. In hindsight, the older, wiser players admitted at Thursday’s Media Day that they drank the Kool-Aid.”We focused on we’ve got to win the national championship instead of taking it one game at a time,” Andrew Harrison said. “We overlooked some teams. We didn’t focus on every practice, every drill and every possession at practice. We paid for it.”They’re hell-bent on making sure history doesn’t repeat itself this season.One year since the 40-0 talk hit a tipping point at last season’s Media Day, there was no talk of historic achievements, no tiptoeing around the possibility of perfection, not even a whisper from the head coach who has admitted that he would one day like to go 40-0 – just because, he says, people say it can’t be done.With a team that probably has a better shot than last year’s group did of going undefeated because of the increase in depth, experience and talent, not a single player talked about 40-0 on Thursday other than to downright squash the talk.”We’re not going to get caught up in the 40-0 talk again like we did last year,” Dakari Johnson said.Said fellow sophomore Dominique Hawkins: “We’re definitely not saying 40-0 because of last year, what happened. We just feel like we need to compete and play our best. Like Coach Cal said, we’re going to take it one game at a time.”Ah, the old “one game at a time” talk. But perhaps there’s actually substance in the old sports cliché with these Wildcats.See, last season, as Hawkins explained, they got caught up in the big picture of the expectations. They heard the talk of the 40-0 and they enjoyed it. They wanted to make history and certainly had the talent to do so.”Coming in freshman year, we probably thought it was going to be easier than we thought,” Hawkins said.The problem was, in looking so far down the road, they forgot all the pit-stops along the way. Before they knew it, they weren’t even halfway down the road with a couple of flat tires and a leaky transmission. Fortunately for UK, the engine was still running at season’s end.”I’d never been through starting five freshmen,” Calipari said Thursday. “I don’t know of many people (who have). So there were things that we went through that it took time.”The Cats say youth had every bit to do with buying into the hype last year.”It’s hard transitioning from high school where no one’s really saying much about you or you have a bad days and it’s just like, it’s just a bad day, it doesn’t really matter,” sophomore Marcus Lee said. “But in college, you have a bad day, it’s blown up. You hear it for three days. And then you have that from that game to the next game to try to change your mindset. It’s just something you learn by doing it.”Calipari calls it the process, something he swears by doing this year despite the allure of the final product.”You cannot skip steps,” he said Thursday.Keep in mind, less than two hours earlier his team had just received the official stamp of preseason hype when it was voted the No. 1 team in the first USA Today Coaches’ Poll of the year. And yet Calipari was more interested in talking about losses this time around than how his team will avoid them. “Is this going to be easy? No,” he said. “How about this? Will there be bumps in the road? Oh yeah. We probably, in all likelihood, are going to lose a couple games. … I have to be patient, too, and understand that’s going to be part of the process.”The process stuff is nothing new from Calipari, but it fell on deaf (and freshman) ears last season. “As players, we’re young and we don’t really understand sometimes the stuff that he’s trying to tell us to get in our minds,” Hawkins said. “When he said it over and over, that’s what helped us realize that we needed to do that.”Only then, when the season was at its last stop, did the players fully understand what their head coach was talking about. Fortunately for them, it wasn’t too late.”Now we realize that since we played last year that every game is going to be someone’s Super Bowl when they play against us,” Hawkins said.The difference this year is the Cats now know that from the outset. “We’ve learned not to think about the season as a whole and just to think game by game and day by day, just to get better,” Lee said. “We’re more prepared because we’re a year older, college wise, and we kind of know what to expect. We know how to get through tough times better. It’s easier to deal with it … when half the team already knows how to deal with it.”The only expectations this Kentucky group is concerned with are its own.”The only expectations I have, again, making this work for all these kids,” Calipari said. “If we do that, they’ll drag this where it’s supposed to go.”