Abstract: The surprising manifestation of collectivity in small collision systems, such as nucleon-nucleon and nucleon-nucleus collisions, is perhaps even more striking when discussed at higher momenta. In larger systems, high-energy elliptic anisotropy is understood as a selection bias effect due to the smaller energy loss experienced along the shorter direction that aligns with the event plane. However, in small systems the amount of energy loss appears insufficient to reproduce the sizable angular anisotropy observed experimentally. In this talk, I present a new mechanism generating preferred orientations for energetic particles without the need of energy loss. In the first part we exploit a toy model that is based on two basic although inalienable ingredients: geometry and quantum mechanics. We use both the stationary phase approximation, which provides transparent analytical expressions, valid for the high-energy regime, as well as an exact numerical method for an elliptical medium, valid for any momenta. Our findings suggest that this sum-over-paths mechanism can provide a relevant contribution to so-called flow coefficients of energetic particles traversing deconfined media of any size. To produce realistic phenomenology we apply the same logic to the effective description of energetic particles traversing deconfined QCD media, the standard jet quenching formalism using dressed propagators in light-cone coordinates. Crucially, we confirm that the stochasticity associated to these more realistic medium correlators does not was out the effect, presenting a strong signal that can be confronted with experiments.