“We are breaking camp after the game on December 21 — if we win.” Those were Mark Pope’s final words ahead of Kentucky’s trip to New York City for the CBS Sports Classic when asked about the team’s plans after the Ohio State game. Everybody could go home for the holidays, but only if they took care of business against the Buckeyes.

Looks like Christmas is canceled for the Wildcats, unfortunately.

Pope was obviously joking and the team is, in fact, going home for this extended break — or staying home for the natives of The Empire State. It’s an opportunity for a much-needed reset after taking a 20-point loss to the chin, the team’s worst performance of the year following a run of games where Kentucky didn’t look great in victory or defeat dating back to WKU ahead of Thanksgiving. Defense and shooting have regressed and these 10 days off until Brown will be used to figure things out in hopes of getting back on the right track going into SEC play.

“I know exactly how these guys will respond,” Pope said following the loss. “They’re going to really, really try as hard as they can to not let this destroy their couple days off. Their job is to get really fresh right now when we get back together on the 26th. And I know these guys; they’ll come in and — it’s not going to be just empty emotion. It’s going to be like, we’re going to get better, and these guys will get better, and we’ve just got to keep trusting what we do.”

Defense is the top concern for Pope while he’s also challenging the players’ trust in one another, the team falling back on bad habits when faced with adversity rather than relying on the training that got them to this point. The guys want to win, but their execution is lacking when pushing to get there.

That’s how you get what we saw inside Madison Square Garden.

“We had some defensive struggles tonight and then we just fell to pieces offensively, and we just went to our default, and our default is not right yet. Our default is still bad habits,” Pope said. “It’s not bad habits coming from a bad place in guys’ hearts. It’s coming from a great place. It’s coming from a desperation to help our team. But we don’t do that by ourselves.

“We do it disciplined, and we do it the way we do it, and we do it by making plays for each other, and that’s still not our default. That’s just a trust-building process.”

There is a fine line between fighting to make winning plays and hero ball, one the Wildcats haven’t quite gotten the hang of as of late. It feels like the right thing to do in real time, but the film tells a different story, one filled with missed opportunities in crucial moments of the game.

They’ve matured since arriving on campus and finding their footing in Lexington, but there’s still a long way to go before they’re where they need to be.

“Man, we struggled,” Pope said. “We just fell into a space where it was trying to fix the team, me trying to make a play to fix the team instead of trying to fix the team by making a play for my team. I know that sounds 30,000-foot level, but it’s just — there was a bunch of possessions our guys wish they could get back. When they look at it, they’ll be like, man, that’s exactly what we don’t do.

“But it takes a ton of discipline. You’re fighting a ton of battles, and when you get stressed and you can’t — I needed to help these guys more on the defensive end, and we just couldn’t find an answer there, and we deal with all that baggage and then you’re slippage — our default is not the right — we’ll get there. They’ve grown so much, and we’ll continue to grow and we’ll get better.”

As Pope made clear afterward, the group is ‘going to lose a lot of sleep over this,’ realizing the slip-ups and how correctable they were. He’s confident, though, they’ll respond exactly the way you hope, turning that pain into a learning lesson you get right moving forward.

“Sometimes when things go wrong, you can build your trust because you get to see, hey, this doesn’t work when we do this this way,” he said. “But these guys will respond beautifully because they’re incredible young men and they’ll come back and work like crazy and they know who they represent and how much it means, and it’s incredibly painful to lose this game. But they’ll respond.”