As some of you have doubtless noticed, there are suddenly a lot fewer comments on this story than there were an hour ago. This is because I deleted a bunch of them, since some of the opinions expressed therein went well outside the bounds of permissible behavior on this website. I was unfortunately unable to address the issue in as timely a fashion as I would have liked, as I'm currently traveling and have limited internet access. Nonetheless, it is my job as the editor of this site to act quickly when such a situation occurs, and I apologize to everyone for falling short. I particularly apologize to anyone who was injured or offended by the expressions in the comments that were deleted; if you'd like to discuss it further with me, drop a comment here and I will get in touch.

That's the problem with running a website like this. Nearly everyone here is smart, thoughtful, considerate, and generally excellent. However, sometimes people get carried away by their emotional attachment to the team--or to something else in their lives--and that spills over here in ways that are inappropriate at best and offensive at worst.

I'm lucky, though, because you, as a community, possess a strong moral compass and are willing to self-police with poise and grace, meaning that I rarely have to get involved and instead get to join in the fun with everyone like another fan. Every once in awhile, though, I have to put on my site boss pants and do something I don't like, and that's what happened today.

The upshot is that one of our most prolific and dedicated commenters will not be around here for a few months. I hope that when he returns to us that this sort of issue won't ever rear its head again. I hope that everyone will welcome him back without any awkwardness or discord, as he'll have served his punishment by then. I hope that the time away will give him room to consider how his love of Fiorentina intersects with the community on this site and in the wider world. And, perhaps more than any of that, I hope that we can all take a moment to think about that last point. We all love soccer here, but it's so easy to subsume our basic human goodness to it without thinking or acting until we lose something that's far more important. I will be giving this subject a lot of thought in the coming days, and I encourage everyone else to do so as well.