Lost one phase in main panel
Most likely scenario: your main has a connection to the bus inside of the panel that distributes the power to all of the other feeder breakers. That connection is likely bad / corroded / burned, something that is creating high resistance. With no lod, your tick tracer picks up that there is voltage present, but as soon as you apply a load to it, the resistance causes the voltage to drop to effectively zero. Resetting the main breaker wiggles it a little to make just enough of a connection to satisfy that tick tracer, but that's it.

This is your life and safety involved here, the next phase of development of this problem may be a fire. you need to call an electrician.