Way to make mouse button input play animation all the way through?

Hello, I'm trying to make my own combo system for a character. Basically, I've got a single animation with two hits that stop or continue based on whether or not a mouse button is clicked once or twice. However, the problem I'm facing is that clicking the mouse button doesn't play the animations, which I assume is because the positive pulse it's sending is too short for the animation to continue. I got around that with booleans, but I found it very unclean and messy. Is there a way to solve my problem without changing a ton of booleans? Example:

     if(Input.GetMouseButtonDown(0))
     {
         isSwinging = true;
         //as you can see, I have to change a bool rather than just place my animation crossfade here
     }
     if(isSwinging)
     {
        animation.CrossFade("exampleanimation", 0.3f);
     }