@drewdevault Physicist here, though I'm not a cosmologist. I'm late to this, but I thought I'd give my response anyway. Energy is conserved in systems where time-translation invariance holds (see Noether's theorem). In other words, if the background on which your system evolves over time doesn't change, then the energy of your system will be conserved. If your system is a ball sitting on the ground, then its energy will be conserved so long as its surroundings remain unchanged (1/3).