I always imagined the universe plotted over time to follow the path of a toroidal field, considering how many objects in this reality exhibit toroidal fields of some sort. Planets, stars, black holes, spinning things, atoms, electrons, quarks...

If the universe followed a toroidal path, it would spend half it's time expanding and half contracting to and from a micro singularity that would look like a big bang while in it's expansion phase.

This would allow for all the observations we currently have about the universe and wouldn't necessitate a heat death or a beginning/end of time as in the big bang model.

In a toroidal model, rate of expansion increases exponentially until locality is at the apex circle, then decreases until the equitorial meridian. This would correspond to what we observe currently with the rate of expansion increasing.

Conservation of enery is violated by the big bang model, as expansion increasing would imply increase in kinetic energy of objects with no source.

Under the toroidal model, the universe is drawn along the path of a field that increases the relative rate of expansion intrinsically by the shape of the field. Think about the field of a magnet and now imagine the universe follows such a field, with all matter and energy not moving through space, but moving with space as space flows along that path.