At the Sundance Film Festival, Vanity Fair asked the one question that was inescapable for much of last fall: “Are you listening to Serial?”

The 12-episode podcast about the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee and the subsequent trial and conviction of her ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, made junior court reporters of us all. While some of the celebrities queried stared ahead blankly, most, like us—celebrities are just like us!—were positively certain that they maybe knew for sure if Adnan Syed killed Hae Min Lee.

The fanatic success of Serial led New York magazine to declare that we were witnessing a great podcast renaissance. Slate’s companion podcast, Serial Spoiler Specials, provided the kind of meta-textual commentary reserved for video games and PewDiePie. There were parodies on Funny or Die and Saturday Night Live. Serial producer Sarah Koenig even found her way onto The Colbert Report. And as the sure sign of one’s arrival, Gawker called the show’s ethos “bullshit” and accused Koenig of “ignorance bordering on irresponsibility.”

It has been months since the last episode and the case is still making news. In December, the Intercept published the first installment of its three-part interview with Jay Wilds, the prosecution’s key witness and unreliable narrator who had refused to speak with Koenig. (Like us, Chris Pine would like to know what happened in those two unrecorded hours before Baltimore police took his statement.) In early February, Syed won a motion to appeal his case on the basis of ineffective counsel—that counsel, lawyer Cristina Gutierrez (now dead, Gutierrez has emerged as the blame repository for many Serial fans), failed to use a witness that could have provided an alibi for Syed. If there’s a re-trial, that witness, Asia McClain—a name, like the expression “the Nisha call,” none of us will soon forget—may be allowed to testify that she’d seen Syed in the library during the crucial 21-minute window in which the state claimed he left school, killed Hae, and then called Jay from the Best Buy, where there may or may not have definitely been a pay phone.

Syed’s lawyer called this appeal his “last best chance,” and a legal expert told Vox that the argument of ineffective assistance of counsel is successful between 1 percent and 8 percent of the time. But Serial wasn’t really about Adnan’s innocence or Hae’s murder. A show like that would have reached a conclusion, like The Thin Blue Line, which famously helped overturn a death row conviction. Because it was the way the story was told—a kind of experiment in discovery, an investigation into what we can and cannot know and if those things we know amount to something true—that was more important than the story it told.

Serial was about Serial: one story told week by week. Better yet, leave it to Ewan McGregor, who asks the one question that matters most. “How hard is it now for them to pick Serial two? Like, what’s it going to be? The bar is so high. It’s almost impossible to cap it.”

Video featuring “Bad Dream (The Theme)” by Nick Thorburn from the original soundtrack for Serial. Available at most digital retailers, as well as direct from the artist on Band Camp.