It's kind of useful to only think of these things as "particles" in a nominal sense. You need to adopt a "quantum imagination". I tend to think of them as a wave or field of probabilities of energy. It sounds weird, but similar to "spin", "flavour" describes a particular relationship between waves or fields of probabilities of energy as it moves through space over time.

A simplified summary: The discovered mass emerges out of this relationship between detection and probability.