More than a year has passed since MLPs last did anyone any good for any appreciable stretch of time. Like all repetitive injury victims, we have by now developed coping mechanisms.

One leans on the obvious: that energy prices as low as today’s won’t last, simply because the entire industry would go broke if they did. The implied corollary is that once crude and natural gas do bounce back, the midstream sector will “get back to normal” as well, taking advantage of rebounding share prices to raise the additional equity capital it so desperately needs.

That’s an attractive theory because it incorporates the reversion to the mean for which commodity markets are well known. We know that both low and high prices spark changes that ultimately swing the market pendulum in the opposite direction. We also know that what’s happened to MLPs over the past year is very much at odds with their long-term performance record. If we’re still holding on, it’s presumably out of conviction that the pipelines will sooner or later become known once again for reliable, tax-deferred income instead of massive capital losses.

Not only is this a beguiling narrative, it’s very much one that is likely to prevail over time. Markets tend to revert to the mean. Pipelines were cash cows for a long time, continue to generate the cash today and will do so in the future, because without them crude doesn’t get from the well to the refinery and natural gas to the furnace or the power plant. The U.S. and the world need more power and fuel this year than last and likely more in 2016 than in 2015; the midstream sector remains a vital link in an energy supply chain that can’t and won’t shut down.

The trouble is that even when the news improves we won’t be able to pretend that the past year never happened. It has, and the aftershocks will reverberate around the industry for a long time.

This is what’s known as “path dependence,” the notion that the past shapes an uncertain future. As Wikipedia explains,

“There are many models and empirical cases where economic processes do not progress steadily toward some pre-determined and unique equilibrium, so that the nature of any equilibrium achieved depends partly on the process of getting there. The outcome of a path-dependent process will often not converge towards a unique equilibrium, but will instead reach one of several equilibria (sometimes known as absorbing states).

This dynamic vision of economic evolution is very different from the tradition of neo-classical economics, which in its simplest form assumed that only a single outcome could possibly be reached, regardless of initial conditions or transitory events. With path dependence, both the starting point and ‘accidental’ events (noise) can have significant effects on the ultimate outcome.”

You can surely see the implications for MLPs. Right now many are effectively barred from raising equity capital, and even if this condition ultimately eases the recent volatility will encourage equity investors as well as lenders to demand a higher rate of return. It’s hard to guess at the extent of this long-term penalty today but easy to believe that it will be material.

How long the current turmoil persists will matter to the sector’s future path as well. If yields remain too high for most MLPs to economically finance growth with equity for much of next year, the sponsors will have to choose from a menu of unpalatable options including distribution cuts, credit downgrades, asset sales, mergers and expensive financing deals with opportunistic institutional investors. If so, their choice of poison will matter for the future as well.

At the moment path dependence and mean reversion are in almost irreconcilable conflict because the current path of least resistance still leads downhill and toward an extreme. But as soon as the current trend exhausts itself, as it inevitably will, that change will start to shape the path as well. Path dependence is neither bearish nor bullish; its implications change as circumstances dictate.

I expect the events of the last 16 months to saddle MLPs with a higher cost of capital and slower growth well into the future. These handicaps should also encourage more industry consolidation, since healthier players with a relatively low cost of capital will have a significant competitive advantage. Slower growth will also promote acquisitions to maintain tax deferral benefits.

But this is only one possible path, and we’ll just have to see how things go. There’s absolutely no shame in admitting that.

None of this means MLPs can’t rally, say, 30% in 2016. From current levels, that would only get the prices back to where they stood six weeks ago. A 50% surge would restore prices to the levels from early August.

Those scenarios likely require much higher oil and gas prices. The good news is that these are coming over the next year or so as spending cuts and well decline rates curb output.       

But no one will get to wake up as if from a nightmare and find themselves back in 2014.