FOXBOROUGH, Mass. – You’ve heard every athlete say it.

“This past season was a bit of a rollercoaster.”

In truth, every season in every professional sport is going to be “a bit of a rollercoaster” to some extent. There are probably going to be ups, just as there are inevitably going to be downs. It’s less about staying off the rollercoaster, and more about managing the twists and turns once you’re onboard.

Broken down in the simplest terms, teams want the highs to be long and sustained, and the dips to be infrequent and abbreviated. Under most circumstances, that’s your best-case scenario.

The New England Revolution, however, have been riding a different type of rollercoaster for the past two seasons. It has the highest peaks in the park – record-setting, even – but it also features some of the most treacherous dips; you know, those ones that send your stomach up into your throat.

It’ll get you where you’re going, sure, but not without a little heartburn along the way.

As a visual reference, here are the Revolution’s result maps from the 2014 and 2015 seasons, with wins (green), losses (red) and draws (orange) separated by color to make trends easy to spot.

2014 RESULTS MAP

2015 RESULTS MAP

In 2014, a year in which the Revolution finished second in the Eastern Conference and advanced all the way to MLS Cup, they endured a club-record eight-game losing streak through the middle of the season. They were able to do so because sandwiched around that summer swoon was a seven-game unbeaten run (6-0-1) and one of the best 14-game stretches in club history (10-2-2).

It was a similar story in 2015. A nine-game unbeaten run early in the season (5-0-4) led way to a 1-7-2 stretch through the early part of the summer. That was followed by a remarkable eight-game unbeaten run (7-0-1) that featured a club-record six-game winning streak, only to be tailed by another winless run (0-3-1) to sink the Revs from top spot in the East all the way down to fifth.

“It’s tough to say exactly,” said Teal Bunbury when asked why the Revs have been so streaky. “It’s something that kind of has happened the past couple seasons for us.

“This next season we’re going to have to work on being more consistent and not have those crazy swings where when it comes down to the end of the season, we’re fighting in a play-in game where we can get a better seed.”

Consistency, of course, is the ultimate goal for the Revolution, as it is for every team in MLS. In the past two years, had they managed just a bit more stability through those difficult summer stretches, they would’ve found themselves in more favorable spots once the postseason got underway.

But how do they find that stability?

“It’s a great question,” said center back Andrew Farrell. “This year, I think at moments we didn’t take it necessarily game by game – we kind of looked ahead a little bit too much.

“It’s tough to do. The teams that make it to the finals take control a little bit better. I think last year we had that low during the summer, but we rode that wave at the end of the year. So I think it’s just kind of managing that, maybe taking it one game at a time. But we have the talent.”

New England aren’t the only team to experience the rollercoaster phenomenon, particularly in MLS, a league defined by parity and therefore, highs and lows leveling out to a mean.

(The New York Red Bulls, this year’s Supporters’ Shield winner, lost four straight games in late May into early June, before rolling straight into a 7-1-1 stretch. FC Dallas, top seed in the West, won five straight games in June and July, but went winless (0-6-3) in the nine games on either side of that streak.)

But while there will be ups and downs throughout the course of a season – this is inevitable – Lee Nguyen believes a more experienced squad will be better equipped to manage those peaks and valleys as the Revs head into the 2016 campaign in search of more consistency.

“I think when you get more guys with experience and vets who’ve been in these situations, it helps get you out of those little lulls sooner,” he said. “I think we’ve been in the spots now, and bringing back the same guys will help.”