The mood in Great Northern land is understandably mixed. In Millinocket, the announcement this week that all of Bowater’s Maine holdings will be sold to Quebec-based Inexcon brought relief to workers and townspeople — there’s life left in their aging, unwanted mill after all. In East Millinocket, the relief is tinged with a measure of disappointment — some had hoped the bond between their more modern mill and its less-attractive sister would be broken.

In the Katahdin region, and throughout Maine, there is uncertainty, skepticism. What, after all, is an Inexcon? How can an unknown, newly chartered business with a staff that can be counted on the fingers of one hand — no towering headquarters, no fleet of corporate jets, no legion of cell-phone toting junior execs, not even a public-relations department — manage two paper mills, 380,000 acres of forest and the nation’s largest privately owned hydroelectric system?

The correct question is not what, but who. It no longer takes a corporate behemoth to pull together a deal like this. A handful of the right people can assess the value and potential of a project, assemble the financing and hire a management team. In the Inexcon principals, Maine may have lucked into the right people.

Chairman Joseph Kass has a remarkable resume. He was a founder of Repap, the New-Brunswick pulp and paper company; he ran it for 20 years. His newest enterprise, Points North Digital Technologies, is a fast-growing leader in Canada’s technology sector. He serves on the boards of several Canadian companies, as well as public-service organizations and charities, most notably the Centre for Renewal in Public Policy and Medical Assistance Program International, a highly regarded relief agency that provides medicine, vaccines and hospital supplies to world’s sick and suffering. Mr. Kass appears to be a doer, a builder. Maine needs doers and builders.

Less is known about Lambert Bedard, Inexcon vice chairman, although his successful turnaround of a defunct Quebec paper mill is notable. He’s said Inexcon is in it to rebuild Great Northern, not to dismantle it. He’s also said some things Great Northern workers would rather not hear — about high benefits and staffing levels, about the need to forego a major upgrade at East Millinocket in favor of more modest upgrades at both mills — but workers should compare his straight-talking realism with the years of rosy, unfulfilled promises they got from their succession of corporate owners. Maine needs more straight-taking realists.

For now, the Great Northern communities can only wait and see. The precise “what” of Inexcon’s overall plans and the nitty-gritty details that matter so much to the individual worker remain to be revealed. Still, after so many years of the turmoil and dashed hopes offered up by far-flung corporate headquarters, the more personal nature of the “who” has to be encouraging.