Animation.CrossFadeQueued: Catch 22

I have a character standing in a looping "idle" animation. When the user clicks the mouse button, the character should play a non-looping punch animation and then cross-fade back to his idle animation.

So the animation state should go like:

idle (looping) -> punch (one-shot) -> idle (looping)

Assuming that "idle" is already playing (looping), my Punch() function looks like so:

void BeginPunch()
{
    playerAnimation.CrossFade( "attack" );
    playerAnimation.CrossFadeQueued( "idle" );
}

Doing this does no cross-fade at all, and the player pops back into his idle animation instead of it being done smoothly. I tried setting "attack" to be WrapMode.ClampForever, but he never switches back to his idle animation and remains in the last frame of his punch animation.

So I call this a catch 22 because: 1) Cross-fading is not possible unless it is done from a looping animation 2) Queuing is not possible if you are using a looping animation (since it technically never ends)

So, having made these points, why does CrossFadeQueued even exist? According to my research, this is impossible. I would like to get my very simple cross-fading example working. Anyone have any ideas/solutions?