ATLANTA, March 30 – The Final Four can be an overwhelming event.

Playing in front of 50,000 people, being interviewed by hotshots from ESPN, practicing in an unfamiliar gym for the most important game of the season – it can all combine to rattle even the most seasoned veterans.

But for Georgetown, with its “one game at a time” mentality, the circus that is the Final Four does not faze the East Regional champions.

“Pretty much just do what we’ve been doing all season,” junior guard Jonathan Wallace said Friday of how his team approaches the weekend. “Like Coach keeps telling us, you have to put it all in perspective as you go along. When we first came here the first two days, all the fanfare had pretty much taken over at that point. Now we’re going over the scouring report, keying in more on the game. Now it’s time to really buckle down and do what we’ve been doing all season.”

What the Hoyas (30-6) have been doing all season is blocking out all distractions, focusing in on just the task at hand, and winning. Winning a lot, actually.

The Hoyas have won 19 of their last 20 – their only loss in the last two months coming at Syracuse at the end of February – and eight straight, from their regular season finale victory over Connecticut through the Big East tournament and now the first four rounds of the NCAAs.

Georgetown has not always won in dominant fashion, but the Hoyas have looked so poised and unflappable that today second-seeded Georgetown is favored over the No. 1 team in the country, the top-seeded Ohio State Buckeyes (34-3), who boast their own 21-game win streak.

“I didn’t even know we were favored, but that’s pretty cool,” freshman guard Jeremiah Rivers said, sitting at his locker as dozens of reporters swarmed the Georgetown locker room. “We don’t go into a game looking at it like we are a favorite or an underdog, we just go into it focused and ready to play.”

That even-temperedness, even from the freshmen in blue and gray, is one of the reasons many analysts favor the Hoyas over the Buckeyes tonight. Georgetown has trailed in each of its NCAA tournament games – down seven to Belmont, eight to Boston College, 13 to Vanderbilt and 11 to North Carolina – but the Hoyas have always remained calm, never rushing their shots and staying true to the patient Princeton offense that brought them this far.

“We don’t want to lose our heads, lose our edge,” sophomore guard Jessie Sapp said. “It we get behind we don’t want to get down on ourselves, we want to keep playing to the end. You have to take it one possession at a time. You have to get your shot and then you have to stop them, so we just go into it one shot at a time.”

No one is better at taking a game one possession at a time than Georgetown, evidenced best by the Hoyas’ methodical comeback in the closing minutes against the Tar Heels. So far in the tournament, nothing has gotten into the Hoyas’ heads and no team has successfully disrupted their game plan. The Buckeyes will try to break the trend tonight, but flustering the Hoyas is easier said than done.

“We’ve just got to keep that same mindset of being consistent, being precise in what we do in order to keep getting wins at this time of year,” Wallace said.