They can talk about it now, and the Lewiston Maineiacs are all smiles.

After waiting a couple of days for Quebec Major Junior Hockey League approval, the Maineiacs learned Sunday their trade for defensive help has gone through.

In a deal with Baie-Comeau, Lewiston officially acquired 19-year-old defenseman Jonathan Parisien on Sunday from the Drakkar for a fifth-round draft pick in 2011.

“This is great for us,” Lewiston GM Roger Shannon said. “We get a big, solid ‘D’ man we can put in there as a defender, and it’s great, because he makes us tougher to play against. That’s what we’re trying to be. He isn’t going to take any flak from anyone, he’s going to defend his zone, and that’s what we want.”

For the second time in two weeks, the Lewiston Maineiacs have tweaked their lineup without sacrificing a rostered player.

Parisien is a 6-foot-2, 195-pound defenseman. He is a veteran of three and a half seasons in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League, all in Baie-Comeau. Parisien has seven goals and 25 assists for 32 points, and 236 penalty minutes in 206 games.

“We’re not going to ask him to run the power play or anything like that,” Shannon said. “For the next four months, he’ll be very enthused and very energetic, because it’s a fresh start for him.”

This year, Parisien wore an ‘A’ for the Drakkar, one of two players to wear a letter (both ‘A’s) in the team’s most recent game, a loss to Quebec.

“He’s a good kid, that’s one of the first things we checked out,” Shannon said. “We got nothing but very good feedback on his character, and that’s a very important component of what we’re building here.”

The surprising part of the deal for Lewiston is that the team gets older with this trade. Parisien is 19, and as an undrafted player, could very well return to the QMJHL as a 20-year-old skater next season. That brings to five the number of players with that potential next season — captain Cameron Critchlow, assistants Sam Finn and Pierre-Olivier Morin and grinder-turned-sniper Etienne Brodeur.

“We’ll worry about next year when next year comes,” Shannon said. “From the look of it, this will be the first time that I can remember in a while that we can go into a training camp and have a fight for the 20-year-olds to make the team. To me, that’s not a bad position to be in.”

The Maineiacs last week split a pair of games playing with five defenseman. They lost Zachary Evans-Renaud earlier this season to a season-ending injury, and have been without Dillon Fournier, who is playing for Team Quebec in the World Under-17 Hockey Challenge in Manitoba. Potential call-up Brayden Wood, who like Fournier is 16, is also in that tournament for Team Atlantic.

The league’s trade window officially closes Thursday, Jan. 6, at noon. Shannon did not comment on any potential pending deals, though he repeated twice that the deadline for any deals to be done is Thursday at noon.