Wisconsin appeared during day one of the NCAA tournament Thursday, practiced for an hour to become accustomed to the MCI Center floor, then got accustomed to New York and national media.

The men’s basketball team will take on St. John’s this evening at 6:40 p.m. in the opening round of the tournament. The Badgers walked through warmups trying to focus on a new opponent but encountered old questions from those who know the Red Storm better than Cardinal and White.

In an afternoon press conference for the East sub-regional in Washington, D.C., Travon Davis, Kirk Penney and Charlie Wills smiled through answers about why UW teams tend to keep the score low, how the team deals with its lack of depth and whether adjusting to first-year head coach Bo Ryan was a challenge.

The issues, old news in Madison, provide a sense of perspective for this team that only returns three members who played in last year’s NCAA tournament. They are not the only ones struggling with unfamiliarity.

That recognized, the mission becomes clearer: Beat St. John’s.

“I think at this point of the year, all that stuff is out the window,” Davis said. “We’ve been doing it for this long. We don’t make excuses. We understand what we have to do and we understand how deep they go. It will be a challenge, definitely, but we’re prepared to win a basketball game and that’s what we came here to do.”

Most of the challenge will be figuring how to defend the Red Storm’s explosive point guard Marcus Hatten. That duty belongs to Davis, Ryan said.

Hatten’s 19.9 points per game make him far and away St. John’s most important weapon. Stop Hatten, who takes about a quarter of the team’s shots, and you stop St. John’s.

Easier said than done. Wisconsin faced two similar keystone players this year — Temple’s Lynn Greer and Iowa’s Luke Recker — and had trouble defending each. The Badgers’ aggressive team defense is not suited to an offense that isolates one player.

Hatten said he was looking forward to matching up one-on-one with anybody. UW insisted it will neutralize the 6-foot-1 junior.

“It will not be a Travon Davis against Marcus Hatten event,” Davis said. “It will be Wisconsin against St. John’s, and whoever executes the most will come out the winner.”

St. John’s will have to dig deep to find focus if it becomes a battle of execution.

Hatten is from Baltimore, but his homecoming was soured Thursday by his grandmother’s funeral. To further compound the distractions, St. John’s head coach Mike Jarvis announced the suspension of fourth-leading scorer Willie Shaw for violating team rules.

But Jarvis was optimistic.

“This team is really difficult to explain,” Jarvis said. “We have a great group of young men where, like our city, whenever you think they’re going to fall, they bounce back.”

The Red Storm won 20 games, 14 at Madison Square Garden, despite shooting just 40 percent for the year.

Relative strangers on the court, St. John’s and the Badgers — who started 1-4, yet won the Big Ten — find common ground in this triumph over adversity.

St. John’s up-tempo style clashes with Wisconsin’s patient swing game, but the teams’ scoring averages are comparable. Both coaches tried to explain to interrogators that deflated scores were not for lack of effort.

“If we could score 90 points every game, we would,” Ryan said.

Jarvis warned a low-scoring game was not foregone.

“You never know what kind of game you’re going to see,” Jarvis said. “If statistics prove out, you’d see a low-scoring game. But if statistics proved out, we wouldn’t be here.”

Both the Madison and New York media understood that.