question concerning traceroute?

I am trying to troubleshoot a latency issue for some of our networks, and was wondering about this.Knowing that routing isn't always symmetrical, is it possible for a traceroute to traverse a different reverse path, than the path that it took to get there? .or will it provide a trace of the path the packet took to reach the destination? According to definition, is should take the same path, but are there any other cases that I should be aware of? Darrell