True H2 manga was long but so was Touch. Major manga is pretty long as well and yet their animating it there's three seasons currently so they can do this as well with Cross Game. There's 10 vol's or so of the manga right now so I guess they can wait two more years and then start animating it so that they'll have enough to make a long running anime series.
And yes that twist early on was a shocker took me awhile to get over it.
