So, last night, Caps winger Joel Ward became a local hero after scoring an overtime goal that will take the team into the second round of the NHL playoffs. Since Ward is black, and some people can’t seem to help but say racist things when black people do awesome things (see: Rue, The Hunger Games), Twitter was treated to a barrage of people calling Ward “nigger.” Delightful tweets, like:

• Joel ward is a fuckin nigger #FuckYou
• #bruins just got beat by a nigger I thought hockey was a white mans game#wtf fuck ward
• Who let that nigger on the ice
• The fact that a nigger got the goal makes it ten times worse #gobacktoafrica

(Ward is of Barbadian descent.)

After the list of tweets made it around the Internet, these Twitter users were pretty quickly smacked by everyone else. Even Caps owner Ted Leonsis jumped in with a blog post:

What these people have said and done is unforgivable. I hope they are now publicly identified and pay a huge price for their beliefs. There should be zero tolerance for this kind of hate mongering. Their messages should now stay glued into the algorithms to place a forever warning and a mark upon these people and their actions. They shouldn’t be able to escape their keystrokes.

Alas, that isn’t how works. Many of the writers have escaped their keystrokes by locking or deleting their Twitter accounts. Though a hardy few refuse to back down!

For his part, Ward told USA Today “it doesn’t faze me at all.”