“We don’t know how they’re going to feel here, but we will try to do everything to make them feel at home,” said Rolandas Aleksandravicius, whose son, Bartas, 18, is the youngest player on the team. “We are not like a third world country. We don’t only have basketball, but beautiful nature, beautiful women. We want them to be successful.”

Many people in Prienai are self-deprecating about their stature relative to the rest of the world. Still, some said they were bruised by the more condescending characterizations of their humble town.

“For me, it’s already tiring, this attention,” said Alvydas Vaicekauskas, the mayor of Prienai. “There’s been a lot of ironical information about Prienai, and people might get the feeling that it’s on the outskirts of the world.”

Americans last week, for example, seemed to particularly fall in love with a factoid that Billy Baron, an American who briefly played in Lithuania, had relayed to a number of news media outlets in the United States: that Virginijus Seskus, the coach of Vytautas, sold meat out of the back of his car after practice.

“I can tell you about the meat,” Seskus said on Saturday, eager to clear up the apparent confusion.

The truth, he said, was this: There is a store in Prienai that produces particularly delicious traditional meat products, such as lasiniai, or smoked pork fat. When he was coaching in Vilnius, where Baron played, one of the players often requested that he pick some up for him.