This is an opinion column.

On July 27, 1996, 29 years ago Sunday, on the eighth day of the Olympics, but so early in the morning it still seemed like the seventh, a bomb went off in Atlanta’s Centennial Park.

It was a huge pipe bomb, designed to kill hundreds. But thanks to chance and rowdy kids and the grace of whatever universal power you choose to credit, the bomb was knocked over. So shrapnel designed to fire into the crowd flew mostly toward the sky.

Still, a mother named Alice Hawthorne was killed, shot through by a nail, as she stood beside her daughter. More than 100 were injured, and a cameraman suffered a heart attack and died.

I’ve tried, over and over, to explain how it felt that day. We all know what it’s like to believe in someone or something so deeply, in a person, or a company, or a myth, or a nation, only to suddenly be forced to question it all. That’s how I felt.

This is why we can’t have nice things. Only more existential.

It is hard to describe the Birmingham of 1996 to those who didn’t live it. Before 9/11, in an age of feigned civility, when common ground was easier to come by and patriotism was not a divisive concept.

The Olympic Games had come to Atlanta, which was a coup in itself. Birmingham’s Legion Field hosted preliminary soccer matches on its hallowed pitch.

I was there. Everybody was. Ask Alabamians of a certain age if they came to watch Team USA star Claudio Reyna give America a 1-0 lead against heavily favored Argentina and you’ll think millions did. It sounded like it. Until reality set in.

Gene Hallman was president of the Birmingham Olympic Soccer Organizing Committee back then. He still gets emotional when he talks about it.

“We’ll forever be part of Olympic history here in the South, which I don’t think anyone ever predicted would happen in our lifetime,” he said. “It’s so hard to explain to my kids today. The odds of Atlanta hosting the Olympic Games, and Birmingham being a part of it, were zero.”

It’s true. And it seemed like the whole South got it.

“The whole Southeast was just really invested,” Hallman said. “Just a lot of pride to bring the Olympic Games to Atlanta.”

I’ll never forget Muhammad Ali stepping on stage at the opening ceremonies in Atlanta. It was a surprise. He was battling Parkinson’s and it seemed like his first public sign of weakness. He struggled, but he lit the cauldron to start the Games.

The thrill of victory. And then the agony of defeat. The power of persistence.

Then the bomb changed everything.

I know Hallman feels the existential question, too. What did we all lose that day? I asked him what he might say if he could confront that bomber now. He thought about it.

“I’d say ‘You bastard,’” he said. “‘You really messed up something that was great.’”

The man who planted that bomb remained a mystery for more than a year. He slipped away as investigators wrongly focused on a security guard named Richard Jewell. Bombs exploded twice more in Atlanta over the next year, at an abortion clinic and a lesbian bar, but it was unclear if they were made by the same hands.

And then, a year and a half after the Olympics, another bomb went off, this time in Birmingham.

A bomber stood up the street from the New Woman All Women clinic, in the shadow of UAB. He’d planted a deadly bomb in the brush, aimed the business end at the clinic lobby, and stood behind a tree waiting for patients and staff to arrive.

But again a bomb designed to kill many was thwarted by the fates. A security guard, an off-duty Birmingham cop named Robert “Sande” Sanderson, saw the bomb and approached it as nurse Emily Lyons prepared to unlock the clinic door.

The bomber watched it unfold. He realized it was now or never, so he pushed the detonator on a homemade remote control and blew them up.

Sanderson died on the scene. Lyons has lived through more than 50 surgeries.

“I am a bombing survivor,” Lyons said recently. “I don’t consider myself a victim. Victim sounds weak.”

She is far from that.

It was another one of those moments that makes you question. Murder in the name of God? Death in the name of life? It is easy to despair at times like these, to wonder if we are truly helpless in the face of madmen, if it is futile to hold on to faith in humanity, or the universe, or divinity. What are we to do in the face of dynamite and madness?

We follow in the path of a man named Jermaine Hughes.

Hughes was a young man in 1998, a UAB student who heard the explosion at the Birmingham clinic and looked up. He saw people running toward the site of the blast.

And he saw one man walking away.

“It looked kind of weird because this guy … didn’t turn around to see what happened,” Hughes told police.

Hughes dropped his laundry. He dropped everything. He embarked on a daring, confounding, unlikely pursuit to the top of Red Mountain.

And that act is the reason the bomber was identified. That act is the reason Birmingham police issued a BOLO a couple of hours later:

Be on the lookout for Eric Robert Rudolph.

It would become, at the time, the largest manhunt in American history.

I covered it along the way, from Birmingham and from North Carolina. I thought there was nothing more I could learn about these bombs. This villain. This hero. Boy, was I wrong.

For the last three years I’ve worked with colleagues Becca Andrews and John Hammontree to tell these stories in audio form. We talked to more than 30 people close to the case, and mined recently unearthed and unheard investigative files and interviews now archived in the Birmingham Public Library.

The first three episodes of American Shrapnel: The Weaponization of Eric Robert Rudolph, launch Wednesday. Subsequent episodes will come out each of the next five weeks.

We explore who Eric Rudolph was, how he was radicalized, and explore whether he acted alone. And we trace the rise of American anger to the moment where we now find ourselves.

We hope you will follow and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

John Archibald is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize.