Couples marry under the breathtakingly beautiful City Hall dome every day. Straight couples. Same-sex couples. I once saw two men, one dressed as Superman and the other as Aquaman, marry at the top of the grand staircase before embracing under the former’s red cape.

It’s San Francisco. Rightly, when it comes to love, anything goes.

But one wedding this month garnered attention for breaking one of the last barriers in this country’s long fight for marriage equality. Rick Welts, president of the Golden State Warriors, married Todd Gage, a Southwest flight attendant, in Room 200.

It is believed to be the first time an executive for a professional men’s sports team married his same-sex partner. According to the Advocate, there are no out players in professional male sports and just a smattering of out executives and coaches. Same-sex weddings in the macho world of men’s pro sports were unheard of — until now.

Mayor London Breed officiated the wedding of Welts, who turns 67 Tuesday, and Gage, 44, at 11 a.m. Jan. 10. She pronounced them “spouses for life,” popped Champagne and served macaroons in the team’s colors, blue and gold.

National Basketball Association Commissioner Adam Silver quipped at the league’s subsequent annual sales meeting in Miami that Welts was there on his honeymoon, garnering good-natured laughs from other team executives.

Just about everybody associated with the Warriors sent Welts their congratulations. Even Kevin Durant, who left the team in October under tense circumstances, texted his former boss his best wishes for a long and happy marriage.

“Never in my lifetime could I have imagined this,” Welts told me in a surprisingly personal interview. “It’s been a really perfect, perfect experience.”

The happiness is a far cry from the decades Welts spent hiding his sexuality, fearing that coming out would endanger his career. He didn’t ask his colleagues questions about their personal lives because he didn’t want them to ask him the same questions.

When his longtime partner Arnie died of complications related to AIDS in 1994, he took just a day or two off work. His secretary explained to callers that he’d lost a good friend; she didn’t know the truth about Arnie either.

A subsequent relationship of 14 years ended over Welts’ refusal to bring his partner out of the shadows.

But his compartmentalized life began to crack open in the summer of 2009. Welts, then the president of the Phoenix Suns, boarded a Southwest flight back to Arizona from Burbank. Passengers walked up one of those old-school rolling staircases to board the plane — and waiting at the top to greet them was Gage.

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“You pick your own seat on Southwest, and as luck would have it, I sat myself in the section of the plane that he was serving,” Welts recalled. “Our eyes met a couple of times. It does confirm that there is such a thing as love at first sight. For me, anyway.”

“He was Mr. 8-F,” Gage told me, still recalling the seat his now-husband selected. “I tried to buy him a drink, but he just had Diet Coke. He swears that when I handed him his drink, I rubbed his hand, which I did not!”

The flight was short and packed, and the men didn’t have much time to interact. But Welts was determined to see Gage again.

“I did what any red-blooded American boy would do, which is write my number on a Southwest napkin,” Welts said with a laugh.

Gage called the number, but was scared off when he learned Mr. 8-F was not only 23 years older than him, but also the president of a professional basketball team. Gage explained that he lived a quiet life in Sacramento with two children from a previous marriage to a woman and didn’t think their lives would mesh.

He said he finally emailed Welts a year later, apologizing for not giving him the benefit of the doubt and asking him out for a glass of wine. They clicked immediately.

But after several months of dating, Gage still wasn’t included at major professional events that Welts attended. Welts said he’d already lost one partner over not coming out and “didn’t want to make that mistake again.” He also secured the blessing to come out publicly from his elderly mother, who was dying of cancer.

At age 58, Welts was finally ready to tell his truth — and came out in a front-page story in the New York Times in May 2011.

“He went through that journey with me, which was quite harrowing, the whole New York media tour and the Times article and everything involved with that,” Welts said of Gage. “He was by my side.”

The coming out went smoothly, and Welts was relieved. The Golden State Warriors hired him as president later that year.

He and Gage now split their time between a home in Sacramento, where Gage’s 15-year-old son is in high school, and a condo that’s walking distance from the team’s gleaming new Chase Center. They decided over dinner last year to marry. It was mutual, with neither one popping the question.

“There was no on-the-knee moment,” Welts explained.

Welts wanted a big wedding, but Gage wanted something small. Welts found a date last fall when the Warriors were at home but had a day off, and the Fairmont Hotel was available. They started compiling a guest list, but it soon grew to an unwieldy 400 people.

“It was me who finally said, ‘Yeah, this is starting to feel more like a work function than a personal moment,’” Welts said. “We revised the date and the plan.”

They chose Jan. 10, a date Gage’s son and 18-year-old daughter, a college freshman in Chicago, were free. And Welts’ younger sister, Nancy Schulte, and his niece were free, too. Breed, a longtime friend of the couple’s, was available to officiate.

Breed met the men as a supervisor when they all traveled to China on a Warriors trip in 2013. She has joked to the couple over the years that the first time she saw the handsome Gage, not knowing he was paired up with Welts, she thought, “That’s it — that’s my future.”

“She decided that if she couldn’t have him, it would be great if I did,” Welts said with a laugh.

Breed said in a statement, “I was proud to perform the nuptials for two amazing San Franciscans, Rick and Todd. Rick has also been an incredible leader in a sports world which hasn’t always been a welcoming place for LGBT people to do something so simple as be open about who they love, and I’m happy to have played a small part in celebrating his marriage.”

It was just the family of six, the mayor and a photographer in the wood-paneled room under the seal of San Francisco as the men said, “I do.” The family had lunch at Boulevard afterward and celebrated with 20 friends that evening at Cavalier. Welts and Gage are planning a honeymoon in Spain after the Warriors’ season is over, which, let’s face it, is likely to be much sooner than in previous years.

Welts’ sister warned me she’d start crying as she talked about her brother getting married, and she was right.

“Twenty-five years ago, Rick stood up for me at my wedding,” she said through tears. “I was just so thrilled that now he can experience that same type of love in his life.”

Back in the 1980s, when the siblings were in their 20s, Welts sat his sister down on a bench in Central Park in New York City and told her he was losing friends to AIDS, she recalled.

“He said, ‘Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?’ Of course I knew. It was a difficult thing to tell his little sister,” she said, adding that coming out publicly has made her brother happier and more carefree. “It’s something he wished he could have done years and years ago. It just has been a sea change in his life.”

The wedding made a splash in the gay media, with a photo Welts shared on Twitter appearing on several LGBTQ news sites. Out magazine ran it under the headline “This History-Making Gay NBA Executive Just Married His Partner.”

In San Francisco, it seems like no big deal. But it is.

“I was just marrying the man I love,” Gage said. “But I guess we made history. How cool is that?”

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears Sundays and Tuesdays. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf Instagram: @heatherknightsf